On Sat, 10 Oct 1998 kim@pvv.ntnu.no wrote:

> I have this idea for almost maximally fast floating point math.
> 32 bit mantissa, and 32 bit exponent, signed int that is.
> 
> To multiply, first mulitply the mantissas, and while the StrongARM does
> that, add the exponents. Then shift mantissa and incrase exponent if
> necessary to make the number normalized, which will happen
> about half of the time.
> 
> To add, Just shift one mantissa the difference between the exponents,
> and add.
> 
> These should be implementable as inline code in gcc, or multiple word
> instructions.
> 
> 0 can be all exponents with 0, or with mantissa >0.5.
> NAN can be all exponents greater than say 2^16.
> 
> Anyway, these 64 bits should have accuracy like 48 bits, but
> it is much faster to split it in words on an ARM.
Hi,
  Whilst this lends itself to good performance on ARM there are potential
compat problems with not be IEEE compatible.

Cheers,
				Mark